June 7, 2015

Have a look at the Flamethrower Ukulele that Caleb Kraft from Make built. Might not be the project that you want to use indoors or around anything flammable that you care about. But if you have a fire extinguisher by your side this sure would be fun to build, if you are an outdoor performer this would double as good crowd control. The system uses a modified calking gun to squeeze a small butane cylinder allowing the gas to flow down a hose to the end of the ukulele neck. A spark ignites the gas and starts the flaming fun.

The prize this week is a HMC5883L Triple Axis Compass Magnetometer Sensor so you can add some directionality to your next project. This contest will run for one week (June 7 – June 12, 2015). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item above and what it can be used for.

June 6, 2015

Mike Szczys from Hack a Day built this great low res 1 Pixel Pacman game. If you had fun playing video games from the 90s you would love this. It is a classic game of pac man built around a 32X32 RGB Pixel display and is powered by a Teensy 3.1.

“The hardware and software running the Smartmatrix made the display portions of the project really simple. First off, the Teensy 3.1 is fast, running at 96MHz in this case. Second, it has Direct Memory Access (DMA) which [Louis] used in the Smartmatrix library. This means that driving the display takes almost no CPU time at all, leaving the rest for your own use. This example of a game is under-utilizing this power… it’s totally capable of full-motion video and calculating amazing visualizations on the fly.”

June 4, 2015

Keeping track of your pills and when to take them can be easy to forget. There are all sorts of pill storage systems but this Atmel 1284p based Smart Medicine Box project by Mingyuan Huang and Jie Zhang from the Cornell University ECE 4760 program made a proof of concept that helps with this.

“There are five major components for our device, including a pill box containing seven separate small boxes; a speaker module; a 3×4 keypad; an Atmel 1284p microcontroller; seven segment LED display (7 units); and a 2×16 characters LCD screen.

The device’s logic structure contains three major stages: 1. User initialization stage. 2. Comparison stage. 3. Reminder stage. In the user initialization stage, the user enters the current time, date and pill information (including amount and serve time for each type of pill). After the user finishing entering all the information, the device will enter the comparison stage unless the initialization button is pressed. During the comparison stage, the system compares the pill information for each of the sub-box with the time counted by RTC. Once the information entered by the user matches the RTC time, the system will jump out of comparison stage and enter the reminder stage. In the reminder stage, the device will continuously play synthesized voice, and the seven segments LED display will show the number of pills needs to be taken on each of the sub-box.”

June 2, 2015

This origami robot starts as a flat sheet, once heated the origami magic starts. Within a minute the robot folds itself to life. Once the structure is done it is ready to get to work. Thanks to a small built in magnet some external electrical fields allow the robot to vibrate around and get to work. It is very insect like in its movements and can actually get some productive work accomplished.

“The unfolded robot, which is made of a magnet and PVC sandwiched between laser-cut structural layers (polystyrene or paper), weighs just 0.31 g and measures 1.7 cm on a side. Once placed on a heating element, the PVC contracts, and where the structural layers have been cut, it creates folds. In under a minute, the robot is finished, and is ready to go, zipping around at speeds of between 3 and 4 cm/s.”

June 1, 2015

The Sensorian is a Sensor Shield for the Raspberry Pi. There is a Kickstarter that still has 24 days to go and is less then 2K from tipping. So if you like developing with the Raspberry Pi and need something to monitor possible input I can think of this might be the shield for you. The device can detect ambient light, temperature, pressure, altitude, motion, magnetic fields, capacitive touch, and time with a real time clock